Call the MLB season off. This (a full hundred and sixty-two game season) is not going to happen. ** The Super Bowl will be delayed by a week because of an additional game in the NFL schedule. The MLB lockout is causing many issues. Pitchers and catchers need to report very soon. Rest of the team follows a week later. Foreign players, (Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Caribbean islands) need paperwork and visas. They report a few days later after the position players do. The lockout is preventing all players from getting in their early workouts and the weight rooms are closed off to them. Pre-season games need to start February 16, 2022. So many players remain unsigned. Team representatives (managers, coaches, general managers, front office) can't even talk to the players that are signed.
The MLB Players Association is not going to stand for seven inning doubleheaders, or having a runner on second base during extra innings. The league can't even decide if the designated hitter rule will be in the National League. The union has to ratify that proposal too.
** A water downed schedule of 60 or so games, like we had in 2020, does not define a World Series Champion. Baseball teams play a grinding schedule that's long and drawn out for a reason. Say what you will, but for the baseball traditionalists (like me), the Los Angeles Dodgers were not the true World Series Champions. Yes, they broke a thirty-two year streak in being post season failures. The Los Angeles Dodgers as a team spend the most money each and every year and are the most fiscally irresponsible team in all of MLB and maybe in all of professional sports. Always paying the luxury tax annually. Yet they have no World Series trophies and their players have no World Series rings during all of that time. Also for example, they release players through the designated for assignment rule, sure all teams do that. But for the the Dodgers, they led MLB with the highest payroll of cut and released players sixteen years in a row. Therefore they are on the hook for players' salaries, such as Jason Schmidt, James Loney, Manny Ramirez, Juan Uribe, and Andruw Jones. Then more recently: Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, Matt Kemp, Chad Billingsley, Chris Perez, Mat Latos, and Ted Lilly years after they leave the playing field. What team goes out and picks up a record fourteen (14) players at the trading deadline? Well, in 2015, that's exactly what they did. Overall, in 2020, they got a garbage World Series trophy for a garbage team. (Being a San Francisco Giant fan gives me the right to say that.)